Do you ever find yourself confused on how to best communicate changes to your employees?    Here is where you need to do some serious brainstorming.  Why?  Because it takes a lot of communication to make a change successful.

As soon as you know that you will be creating change in your department, you must communicate to your employees so they know what is happening.   You are probably thinking…why get them anxious about the change when you don’t know all the details yet.  They sense it already…as if the walls in the conference rooms have ears.  It’s much better to hear from you and not from someone outside the department or company.

Whether it’s a companywide or department change, you still have to motivate your team to understand, participate and accept the required changes.  In order to motivate your staff, you need to plan…plan…plan.    What do you need to plan?

• Understand what needs to change.   Describe in detail the issues and include your key staff as part of the process.  It may be helpful to use a mind mapping tool that can help you break out all the potential issues.   Check out www.mindjet.com for a simple solution to mapping out a problem or a solution. 

As I said before, assume that people will always react to change…good or bad.  It doesn’t matter if the change is major or if it’s a minor change to a process.  People react!    So how do you as a Manager handle your team’s reaction to a change.

Before you can evaluate your team’s reactions, you first need to become aware of your own.  

How Are You Reacting to Change?

• Do you support the change 100%? 

Starting the process of change can be exciting and daunting at the same time. 
When we become conscious of something not working, our initial reaction may be to ignore it or to try to incorporate the change right away.  Lasting change takes time to organize and communicate to everyone.  

Change occurs at the individual level.   Yes, you may drive the change, but the effectiveness of the change occurs at the employee level.   Your job as a manager is to present the change in a way that is understandable and manageable for the people involved.   

The word “change” provokes many different emotions…from excitement to fear and in between.  Change is ongoing within an organization, so why not become knowledgeable on how to manage change within your team and yourself.

Mirriam-Webster Online states: “Change” is:

• to give a different position, course, or direction to 
• to replace with another 
• to make a shift from one to another 
• to undergo a modification of 
• to undergo transformation, transition or substitution

Everyone has different reactions to change…some excited, others dreading anything that is out of the ordinary.  So how do you predict reactions to change?  The basic assumption you can make is that anything or everything that you change will elicit a reaction.